Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) will have to drive his Dodge Grand Caravan a little faster if he wants to catch up to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

A Quinnipiac University poll published Thursday found that O'Rourke, who is challenging Cruz in the upcoming midterm elections, is still 9 points behind. Cruz has held his 54-45 percent lead, the same lead he held last month. Though O'Rourke hasn't gained any ground with likely voters overall, he has won over more women; 52 percent of women polled said they back him, while 62 percent of men support Cruz.

The campaign is "far from over, but Sen. Cruz would have to suffer a major collapse for him to lose," said Quinnipiac's assistant director Peter Brown. "That is even more unlikely since 97 percent of Cruz voters say they are sure they won't change their minds"

O'Rourke has run close behind Cruz for several months, posing just enough of a threat for Cruz's supporters to launch a new wave of sharp criticism against the congressman. O'Rourke's camp, for their part, have continued to push on Cruz's unpopularity in the Senate. The Democrat has gained something of a cultfollowing, both from Texans who want to flip the seat and Democrats all over the country hoping for a blue wave. Despite his growing fandom, however, O'Rourke may be out of luck in the largely red state: 94 percent of Republicans say they are sticking with Cruz.

The poll was conducted Oct. 3-9, surveying 730 likely voters in Texas by phone. The margin of error is 4.4 percentage points. See more results at Quinnipiac University. Summer Meza

Jussie Smollett returned to work the day of his arrest and reportedly told Empire's cast and crew he's innocent.

Chicago police on Thursday arrested Smollett after a grand jury charged him with one count of felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report. Authorities said in a press conference that Smollett had staged an attack against himself because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire.

Empire is currently in the middle of production on the end of its fifth season. Smollett returned to work Thursday after paying a $10,000 bond, and according to CNN, he apologized to the cast and crew in a meeting. But he continued to maintain his innocence, which left one source in attendance "shocked and dismayed," CNN writes.

Fox said prior to Smollett's arrest that he is not being written off Empire after reports his scenes were being scaled back. But the network said Thursday, "We are evaluating the situation and we are considering our options."

Smollett has not commented publicly since being charged, but his lawyers said in a statement Thursday that he "fiercely and solemnly maintains his innocence and feels betrayed by a system that apparently wants to skip due process and proceed directly to sentencing." Chicago police say they have evidence that Smollett orchestrated the supposed hate crime, including a check written to the men he said attacked him. Brendan Morrow

Rachel Maddow added a little something special to the historical record on MSNBC Thursday night, and she says it's pretty relevant to today's geopolitical situation. She began with a note Vice President George H.W. Bush wrote to disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew in October 1988, thanking him for his advice right before a game-changing presidential debate against Michael Dukakis. Agnew, Maddow reminded viewers, had resigned in 1973, right before Watergate broke, and narrowly avoided jail for tax fraud.

But her main event was a secret deal between Agnew and the Saudi crown prince in 1980. It starts with a telex in which Agnew begs the crown prince for an audience to address "a personal emergency that is of critical importance to me." An August 1980 letter spells out what that personal emergency was. Maddow summarized it like this: "Spiro Agnew was writing to the Saudi royal family to solicit their help, their financial support, for him to lead a scorched-earth propaganda campaign in the United States to expose the Jews. To wage a political war on Jews in America."

Specifically, Agnew painted a conspiracy to destroy him by "Zionists" and the media "they" control, and asked for $600,000 that he could live off while he continued "my fight against the Zionist enemies who are destroying my once great nation." And in Maddow's "favorite part," Agnew signed off: "My congratulations to Your Highness on the clear and courageous call to Jihad."

"The jihad-congratulations reference there appears to be a reference to the fact that the Saudi crown prince, just days earlier, had publicly called for a holy war against Israel," Maddow explained. And the Saudis appear to have given him at least $100,000. "Less than 10 years out of office, a former American vice president orchestrated a secret financial deal with Saudi Arabia to fight Jews in this country," she reiterated. "That seems like something that should matter even today," when the same Saudi royal family is in control. Watch below. Peter Weber

Former President Barack Obama was at the Duke-North Carolina game Wednesday night when Duke star Zion Williamson's shoe split, leaving him with a knee injury, and Stephen Colbert showed Obama mouthing "His shoe broke" at the game on Thursday's Late Show. "It's so refreshing to see a president who can actually see a problem and identify it — you know Trump would have said 'Fake shoes,'" he said. "Of course, Obama's not everybody's cup of tea. Some people prefer Trump. For instance a lot of local news stations are owned by a company called the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has been accused of being pro-Trump."

On Monday, Sinclair made 50 stations broadcast a "must-run video" from chief political analysts and former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, and one particularly sycophantic suggestion caught Colbert's attention. "Trump on Rushmore might not be that far-fetched because — and I swear this is real — there's a section of the mountain that already kind of looks like him," he said, showing the image. "But if pro-Trump reporting and his aging skinhead fanboys calm, then we've prepared an ever more pro-Trump message from our in-house broadcast team Real News Tonight."

Also on Thursday, Trump friend and longtime adviser Roger Stone was hauled into court over an Instagram post that seemed to threaten Judge Amy Berman Jackson with crosshairs. In one of his funnier excuses, Stone said he thought the crosshairs was a Celtic symbol. "Oh yes," Colbert deadpanned. "It goes back to Roman times when the Celts in Northern Europe used to threaten judges on Instagram."

The judge told Stone she had "serious doubts" he's learned "any lesson at all" and appears "to need clear boundaries" — "Yes, possibly a series of vertical steel boundaries," Colbert suggested — and she gave Stone a full gag order. "So if you want to communicate with Roger Stone," Colbert said, "do it the old-fashioned way and contact him through his Russian hackers." Peter Weber

Federal prosecutors have charged Internal Revenue Service investigative analyst John Fry with leaking confidential suspicious-activity reports (SARs) about Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer, to Michael Avenatti, the attorney representing porn actress Stormy Daniels, according to court documents unsealed in San Francisco on Thursday. SARs flag potentially unlawful bank transactions, and Fry reportedly admitted to describing and sending images of Cohen's SARs to Avenatti in May 2018 and discussing them with New Yorker journalist Ronan Farrow.

The Washington Post and Farrow's New Yorker soon published articles, based on the SARs, tracing Cohen's hush-money payments to Daniels to stay quiet about her purported extramarital affair with Trump. Both articles are cited in the government's criminal complaint. Cohen has since pleaded guilty to campaign finance law violations stemming from those payments, which he says he made on Trump's orders. The SARs also led to the discovery of other shady payments to Cohen. Peter Weber

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw told the Justice Department that he may expand his order from last July that the Trump administration reunite most families separated under President Trump's "zero tolerance" border policy in the light of new evidence that the policy started earlier than originally acknowledged.

"No one but a few in the government knew that these separations had been going on nine or 10 months before, and that hundreds if not thousands of children were" being separated, Sabraw told Justice Department lawyer Scott Stewart. "The court didn't know that and plaintiffs didn't know that, and I don't think government counsel knew that." Stewart pushed back, saying accounting for and reuniting more than the roughly 2,800 families included under Sabraw's original order would "blow the case into some other galaxy" and suggested such an decision may push the Justice Department to fight Sabraw "tooth and nail."

The ACLU, the plaintiff in the case, wants Sabraw to extend his order to all families separated under Trump since July 2017, and ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said his organization is "prepared, no matter how big the burden is," to continue helping track down separated parents and children, with information provided by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services. The first step is identifying which parents and children have been separated. "It's important to recognize that we're talking about human beings," Sabraw reminded Stewart. "Every person needs to be accounted for."

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued separating hundreds of children from their families under a system where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents untrained in child welfare decide if a parent poses a "danger" to the child, USA Today details. "Family separations are still very much happening in the southern border," Efrén Olivares at the Texas Civil Rights Project tells NBC News. The organization has discovered at least a few wrongly separated families, he added. Peter Weber

Besides bamboo, there's nothing Mei Xiang and Bei Bei love more than frolicking in the snow.

The giant pandas live at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. During a snowstorm on Wednesday, Mei Xiang, 20, and Bei Bei, 3, went wild, tumbling and doing somersaults on the fresh powder. When they weren't rolling around in the snow, they were climbing trees, falling down from trees, and stopping for bamboo breaks. Watch the adorable video below. Catherine Garcia

For years, an eight-foot sculpture titled "Young Lincoln" has been on display inside the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse. Made in 1941, it's the shirtless, smoldering version of the 16th president, complete with the limestone Lincoln tugging at his waistband (before you get too excited, he's got a book in the other hand). Someone recently snapped a photo of the sculpture and posted it online, and now, people are having a field day renaming the piece, calling it "Babe-raham Lincoln," "The Gettysburg Undress," and "Honest Abs."

The sculpture was made by James Lee Hansen when he was only 23, and at the time of its unveiling, he was criticized for not putting a shirt on the president. Hansen explained that "from a sculpturing standpoint, it's better to show the body without any clothes. That's why I left 'em off." While he could have followed up with "F.D.Rawr," "Young Lincoln" was Hansen's only sculpture of a topless president. Catherine Garcia